Nigeria Content Online

Auwal is 27, and
sells kola nuts. His heels have worn through his flip-flops. There is
no accurate way of measuring the distances he walks everyday peddling
kola nuts, but 10 kilometres is not a bad guess. He has a wife and
children back home, as well as aged parents he has to assist from time
to time. The combined value of his tray and the kola nuts he sells is
about N2,000. He lives from his tray.

Musa mai tabur has
a small table at the gate of the uncompleted building where he has
lived for a number of years. He is not sure of his age, only that he is
over 30 because he was born when General Obasanjo was head of state. He
does not have to trek long distances to sell his wares. On his table
are sweets, detergents, pure water, cigarettes, mosquito coils and a
variety of other things. He travels back home once in a while to see
his family. His entire stock is worth about N5,000. He lives from his
table.

Danjuma is a
teenager. He shows absolutely no fear as he darts in and out of
traffic, selling chewing gum to motorists along the highway. He is not
sure of his age, and frankly cannot be bothered. Whether he gets to eat
something each day depends on how much chewing gum he is able to sell.
He has no table, no tray and no wares of his own. He only gets a
commission on whatever he is able to sell each day. He has no
dependants yet, just fighting the brutal battle to survive by selling
chewing gum, come rain, come shine. He lives from meal to meal.

Ibro sells Gala.
His favourite spot is just before the traffic lights where vehicles
stop for a minute or two. His best customers are the harried and hungry
passengers in taxis and buses who buy Gala and canned drinks for a meal
on the go. Ibro is ever on the lookout for municipal authorities that
may arrest him and seize his carton of Gala and drinks. He has been
arrested many times before and his goods ‘forfeited’ to government. But
he comes back to the same spot as soon as he can raise enough capital
to stock up. The total value of his wares is about N4,000. He is
married with a child and sends money to his siblings whenever he can.
He lives from his carton.

Buba knows every
corner of the city. On his bicycle selling ice cream and bottled water,
he pedals as far as he can and only gives up when he is overcome by
sheer exhaustion. The bicycle does not belong to him, nor the ice cream
and bottled water. His is just to sell for a commission at the end of
the day. On good days, he earns between N600 to N700. But on very wet
days, he earns just enough for a meal to make up for the tens of
kilometres he pedals daily, rain or shine. He came to the city because
there was nothing to inherit from his family’s farm. Now he sends money
back home to his wife and children.

He lives from his icebox.

Danbala is not yet
10. His father is a security man, while his mother sells tuwo at
whatever construction site she can find. Along with his father, mother,
two stepmothers and other siblings, they live in the one room gatehouse
of the house where his father works as security man. For Danbala,
school is out of the question. He collects boxes of matches from Musa
mai tebur for sale to motorists and pedestrians. There is no pay and no
commission. He takes whatever Musa offers, grateful for a morsel or two
from Musa’s tuwo. His entire being is programmed to fighting the ever
present pangs of hunger to which he was born and from which there is no
probable escape. He lives from errand to errand.

These are real life people from a city in the North. The names may
be Emeka, Dele, Akpan or Joseph. The goods they sell may be ‘pure
water’, recharge cards or newspapers. All across Nigeria’s towns and
cities are millions of under-aged children and youth in the grip of
hunger and poverty. They live a brutish life, eking livelihoods from
trays, cartons, baskets and iceboxes, weaving through traffic and
defying death at every turn. They live from day to day.

I have already
anticipated the disdain with which the word “liver” will register in
the reader’s mind. Liver indeed! Of all the choice parts of meat that
one can eat and enjoy, why would anyone choose liver! Because it has
potential that’s why; potential for hot satisfying moorishness if
cooked just right.

For a few moments,
banish all the associations that your mind makes when it encounters the
word, like cod liver or food prescribed for geriatrics; cubes of
leather in party fried rice; meat in “poverty stew”; dejected looking
airline pate that tastes like plastic.

Think instead of
new yam, out of the ground for a few weeks and not so very bitter
anymore, just a little hint of bitterness in the back of the tongue,
not as flavourful as old yam, but texturally nice; falling away when
overcooked or cooked with a little salt.

Some people think a cube of sugar in the water for boiling the yam improves its taste. I disagree.

Now think of my
liver stew to go with new yam on a Saturday morning. This is one of the
only meals that I think back to my childhood and am totally,
completely, unabashedly nostalgic about.

On Saturday
mornings, my mother would cut up plenty of onions. This is the secret
of good liver stew; heaps of onions. The way the onions are cut matters
immensely; not chopped but cut in slivers, thin slivers, moderate
slivers, fat slivers because textures matter. Thin slivers will merge,
moderate slivers will curl appealingly in the stew, fat slivers will be
highlights, translucent with a slight bite.

The type of onion
also matters; not white but purple. One also needs some julienned green
pepper, one or two hot peppers chopped and some grated garlic and
ginger.

I tweaked my
mother’s recipe a little by first quartering half of my onion, and
putting it in the oven with half a leek, sprinkled with olive oil for
about thirty minutes. Waste of gas you might say, but this gives the
stew a fuller charred sweet onion flavour since roasted onions are
sweet and mellowed.

From the oven, I
transfer the roasted onions to a thick-bottomed frying pan with more
olive oil and some butter, along with my slivers of raw onion, my
peppers, garlic, ginger and salt and stir everything over moderate heat
for about twelve minutes. The frying mixture has to be moved around so
that the onions don’t burn or go brown.

My liver goes in the stew with more stirring and some salt.

One can’t dare to
leave it and go in the other room! It first greys on the outside
firming up, but the inside remains blood red. With more stirring (about
five minutes) and the gradual addition of small amounts of water, a
stew is formed. I add two bay leaves and some thyme. One needs to keep
watch over it to make sure that there is no sign of blood in the meat,
that the stew doesn’t dry up, and that it cooks to the texture of well
cooked red meat.

This does not
equate to endless cooking but to a point where the liver is both well
cooked and still soft. The stage after this is hard, leather like
texture. The only way to do it right is just to be vigilant. One good
marker; if one’s sense of smell is acute is that the liver will be
perfectly cooked when there is no smell of blood.

Some people are put
off not only by liver but also by onions, so that the very thought of
combining the two is torture. But I guarantee that even the avid hater
will change his mind once he tastes the liver, cooked, rested in the
umber coloured stew.

The other way to accompany my stew apart from freshly boiled slabs of yam is thickly cut bread dipped with fingers.

Like a recurring
bad dream, one of the violence prone fault lines running across the
country erupted again on Tuesday, sending residents of Bauchi running
helter skelter and causing the death of some officers of the Nigerian
security apparatus and some civilians.

The people behind
this latest outrage, members of the so-called Boko Haram (literally:
western education is a sin) are well known to Nigerians. Last year, the
group embarked on an orgy of violence and destruction that affected
several states in Northeastern Nigeria and led to the deaths of
hundreds of people as security forces reacted with violence to curb
violence. Incidentally, one of the outcomes of that incident, and the
ham-fisted way in which security agencies responded was encapsulated by
the cold blooded murder of the then leader of the group – which a
member of the police force, most likely, helpfully leaked on the
Internet.

There is little
doubt that this group has reorganised under a new leader and its
members are now doubly embittered against the state. Last year’s bloody
crackdown must have added to their social antipathy on top of the
existing conditions that had fed their protest in the first place.
Going by Tuesday’s attack on the prison – reminiscent of their attack
on police stations last year, it appears this group is still wedded to
its beliefs in violence and has learnt nothing from the killing of its
members last year.

More surprising is
the reality that our security forces have also not learnt much from the
other time. Despite lengthy investigation and an even lengthier report
– some 17 reports to the Presidency by some counts – the group was
still able to plan and launch a major attack in a cosmopolitan state
capital such as Bauchi, and was able to shut the town down for hours.

The presidency has
acted robustly by firing the head of the police and that of the State
Security Services and new men put in their place. But this is hardly
the solution to the issue, as one of those reports must have pointed
out.

One place to look
is the criminal justice system. Hundreds of people arrested over last
year’s violence are still being processed without any likelihood that
they will receive justice anytime soon. Matter of fact, there is some
sense to the attack launched on the prison, as the Boko Haram were able
to forceful free all prisoners – including some of their own members
detained within the facility.

It is easy to see
how the disgust with ‘westernisation’ spreads, especially if this is
represented by an unresponsive federal judicial and security system and
clueless state political leadership. It is likely another bout of
arrests will be carried out after Tuesday’s rampage and the suspects
will simply disappear into the maws of the judicial system. They will
be an addition to hundreds of thousands of suspects from various other
disturbances in the country.

The Ministry of
Justice would do well to hasten the trials of these detainees and
release those found innocent. This would serve to strengthen the
people’s confidence in the system and reduce their default reaction to
take the law into their own hands.

Government should
also use this opportunity to reorganise the intelligence gathering and
civil law enforcement agencies. It is apt to punish the head of such
agencies, but the rot surely goes beyond the two men. Their
replacements would do well to look into this.

But beyond this is the now tiresome call for our political leaders
to do the job for which they were actually elected. Groups such as Boko
Haram thrive on the misery and poverty of the people and a functional
society should reduce their allure. All arms of government need to
rebuild Nigeria’s infrastructure and nurse the economy back on track.
Failure to do that will ensure that the fault lines continue to erupt
into violence – and at a growing cost to society.

Plagued by endless
corruption accusations, vast overspending claims and huge construction
delays, you would be forgiven for thinking none of Delhi’s inhabitants
were overjoyed about the city’s upcoming Commonwealth Games.

But you’d be mistaken, at least according to India’s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad.

A few weeks ago he
said that the construction sites for the Games, which kick off in just
over 24 days, were providing perfect conditions for the city’s
mosquitoes, and laying the blame for the city’s record-breaking dengue
outbreak squarely with the organising committee.

“Dengue and water
is strongly related. Delhi is already dug up because of the Games and
it is also raining heavily. Since water remains accumulated in many
places, it becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes, which are
contributing to diseases,” Azad told reporters.

Throwing salt in
the organisers’ wounds was his thinly veiled accusation that had the
work been completed on schedule, and the construction completed before
the monsoon weather arrived, this year’s outbreak of the deadly virus
could have been avoided.

The embarrassing issue for the much-maligned organising committee is that he may well have a point.

Across the city,
pits and troughs scattered around uncompleted Games venues have filled
with rainwater during the recent monsoon downpours, providing the
dengue-spreading Aedes mosquito with perfect breeding grounds.

This year’s count
of dengue victims in the city – currently totalling 434 – represents a
huge rise from 3 last year and 55 in 2008. But do two swallows make a
summer?

Indeed, a
spiralling dengue victim count needs a scapegoat, and what better
culprit than the Games, which is already disliked by many of the city’s
residents.

But Azad’s timing
is intriguing. Recently, his government has slowly become engulfed in
the Games’ bad publicity, with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appearing
to step in, in an attempt to provide relief to Suresh Kalmadi, the
Chairman of the Organising Committee.

Whether or not his
comments are true, or indeed supported by his party, Delhi is anxious
to be rid of the outbreak before the high-profile event begins in
October.

City
administrators, who are hard at work with fogging machines to prevent
mosquito breeding in danger areas, said that week that none of their
employees would get time off until the monsoon season concludes, while
mobile vans have been laid on to rush victims to 24-hour dedicated
hospitals.

According to an
advertisement published by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, 6,125
people have been prosecuted this season for allowing water stagnation
to occur on their property.

Following Azad’s comments, perhaps prosecutors will make a visit to
Kalmadi’s office in the coming weeks. Until then, Delhi’s love-hate
relationship with the Commonwealth Games rumbles on.

If you suddenly had
all the money you wanted to spend on anything you liked, would you take
it in your stride, calmly fulfilling all your material desires in a
businesslike manner or would the prospect drive you into a tizzy of
panic and indecision?

You might think
that this is a problem any one would give their eyeteeth to have, but
think carefully about it. Few human beings can handle the pressure of
spending responsibly and reasoning clearly when the sums involved
defeat the very powers of their own imaginations to count or to
conceive.

Of course we read
more stories about people coming into sudden wealth ending up even
poorer than they were before because they made such rash and
irresponsible decisions. They had no concept of the money running out
and went on a spending spree; there was so much they forgot to count
and so on and so forth. Since the boring stories about those who
buckled down and planned before they spent don’t make the same kind of
headlines, one might be forgiven for believing that they are truly in
the minority.

Faced with the
prospect of a material solution to all your problems what would be your
first priority, knowing that there is no end to wanting, (because even
if you did not know you will certainly find that out, since even the
very rich find the need to keep making more money)?

Do you think your
first task would be answering to your immediate needs? That sounds
obvious enough, but when the money at your disposal means that
absolutely everything you might want can be instantly available, the
concept of immediate starts getting really blurry. Everything is
possible, so where do you start?

Okay so you want a
state of the art, custom built, silent, clean,
environmentally-everything generator to make you completely independent
of PHCN’s foibles. You also want to be immune to any hiccups that might
occur on a so-called road map to power, the blueprint of which you have
not even bothered to peruse closely. In fact you might just consider
making the road map redundant and solving the issue of 150 million
neighbouring stone age generators disturbing your peace.

Mind you, you would
be really certifiable if you considered that act of philanthropy
because the wahala would be mind boggling, one that even your
gazillions would not be able to solve given that the country you would
be seeking to help, admittedly in a round about way, is called Nigeria.

Consider the red
tape: importation, registration and explaining why you want to be a
Samaritan to befuddled officials! Imagine fighting off politicians
determined to dabaru your game, whatever that is, since to them, it is
so patently counterintuitive for anyone desirous of wielding power,
political not electrical, to want to create anything even mildly
democratic as providing the greatest number with anything as basic as
light or water. The epitome of power in their minds is holding one
particular political office, to what end, no one has ever really been
able to fathom given the problems of development that still plague
Nigeria.

Given that then…
you would probably not even have the time to begin to reflect on what
you might do with your money before your street would be closed off by
hundreds of immediate family members, extended family members and their
friends and close and extended family members, with the friends of
those friends’ extended family members.

Different
townspeople groups, domestic staff, drivers, security guards and their
close and extended family members would flank all of these groups. I
don’t know why anybody needs ‘friends’ on Facebook in Nigeria. We have
absolutely no issues with social networking, if anything we define it
for the rest of the world, virally and otherwise, even without Internet
connectivity and generous broadband availability. On our shores your
brother is your only keeper. Your president? Don’t count on it.

At this point it
can truly be said that your problem would have bought itself a hat and
a walking stick. You would certainly have to set your house in order,
develop administrative capacity, sort out priorities, rules of
engagement, certification and accountability and get your self some
money managers to invest and keep resources going to settle that
endless chaos outside your front door. In all you would have an
effective cabinet to provide responsible governance of your gazillions.

A final word of advice, all hypothetical of course: don’t call
yourself a politician; don’t even think of running for president. That
one is a completely different ball game, with everything to do with
taking and bamboozling and nothing to do with service and creating.

We are told that successful people and successful nations play to their strengths.

They analyse what
they are good at, what resources they have, where they can add value
and direct their efforts and energy in that direction.

When they make
careers out of what they are good at and what they enjoy, they are
likely to be successful and happy doing that. They are likely to
relocate to the most suitable place to run that business or offer that
service; and by their cumulative or combined efforts, the industry
thrives.

I was conversing
with an architect friend just last week, enquiring about how profitable
it is to make a living from architecture; and remarking on how
fortunate I believe architects are to make a living from their passion,
very much like artists, musicians and so on. The conversation turned to
ways of starting a second or parallel career to supplement one’s
income. I suggested playing to one’s strengths and building an income
stream around it. I asked him what his strengths were and how they had
already assisted him in making a success of his occupation. To my
surprise, even though he was passionate about design and architecture,
he said he did not really know what his strengths are.

He said that most
of his peers don’t know what they are good at, or what their strengths
are. They just find work to earn money and put food on the table and
that is why there is so much job frustration and, basically, no job
satisfaction at all. What a revelation! How many of us know what our
strengths are, as they relate to our work and our occupation? For those
of us who do, how did we discover what our strengths are? Let’s take
this to the national level. I am quite sure that eight out of any 10
people I ask will know what Indians are good at, or what the strengths
of the Chinese are.

Ask what Nigerians
are good at; what our strengths are; and what we are known for. Other
than the immediate negative responses such as 419 scams and corruption,
people would have to take a moment to think about it. On reflection,
they would say that Nigerians are enterprising, but how has that
translated into a national strength?

Our traders and
markets are largely in the informal economy; and Dangote alone cannot
represent the spirit of enterprise in the nation. They would say that
we are excellent at problem-solving and coping, but has this talent
been directed by our policy makers to solving our national challenges?
They would say that we are known for our creativity. Yes, through
individual effort, writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka,
musicians like Fela, Asa, TuFace and so on have become internationally
acclaimed. How are other creative spirits nurtured and encouraged,
other than through private avenues such Terra Kulture and Nike’s
Gallery. Our unappreciated museums full of valuable artefacts have been
left to deteriorate.

Diversity as strength

A wonderful trend is that you can study almost any subject you can imagine.

Throughout your
education, starting in primary school, the teaching staff are
talent-spotting, busy identifying latent or developing skills, talents,
passions, or potential. It is rare for a child to reach age 16 and not
know what they are good at, both academically and vocationally and what
kinds of careers they can pursue.

Here, the majority
graduate from school having passed their exams, and that is all. The
fortunate minority would have engaged in formal music, arts, or sports
programmes in private schools. Even those who were award-winners in
extra-curricular activities never imagined making a career out of them
and are actively discouraged from playing to their strengths by their
advisers.

We are known for
being very intelligent and good at cramming facts to pass exams. So,
for many children, the subjects they get good grades in are not
subjects they have any interest in. What kind of career guidance do
school children get about how the subjects they take for SSCE will
affect their A’levels/JAMB and how their choice will affect their
careers?

How can we know
what our real strengths are? Without identifying them, how can we, as a
nation, harness our strengths? Natural resources are just that,
resources. Without people and functional systems to exploit and benefit
from them, they will not do us any good. To the contrary, we will be
left to live with all the disadvantages of extractive industries
without enjoying the beneficial effect they can have on a people, as we
have seen in the Middle East.

Let’s start at the beginning, with education and with the children.

Help those around
you in the workplace, who are square pegs in round holes, to find
square holes to thrive in. Employers should use personality profiling
to allocate their human capital where they can perform the best on
their own and as part of teams.

Oh yes, one of our strengths is our diversity. We haven’t yet
figured out how to play to it yet. All I have seen is pandering to
different groups instead of pulling the strengths of our diverse
ethnicities to propel us into G20 status and achieve our Millenium
Development Goals.